Tetrapolitan Confession

1530. A Protestant confession of faith drawn up by Martin Bucer* and Wolfgang Capito* at the Diet of Augsburg, and presented by Jakob Sturm in the name of the cities of Strasbourg, Memmingen, Lindau, and Constance. Its purpose was to prevent a rupture in German Protestantism. It had Zwinglian affinities, but its doctrinal formulae were based on the Augsburg Confession, of which the compilers had obtained a copy. It was not generally accepted as was the Augsburg document, but it did become the symbolic formula of the four cities. With Bucer's “Greater Catechism” it was accepted by Strasbourg as binding on that city (1534), on the basis of which the magistrates decreed the banishment of persistent Anabaptists.*